Doctor Who Gets a Dungeons & Dragons 5E-Compatible Tabletop Roleplaying Game

Cubicle 7 has announced a new D&D 5E game…with D&D standing for Doctors & Daleks. The publisher of Doctor Who: The Roleplaying Game announced that they would also publish a separate Doctor Who tabletop roleplaying game that uses Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition rules. Few details were announced about Doctors & Daleks, other than that the first book in the series The Doctors and Daleks Player’s Guide will launch soon. Cubicle 7 also confirmed that it would continue to publish and support an upcoming Second Edition of Doctor Who: The Roleplaying Game, with print copies of the new Core Rulebook expected in Q2 2022.

While it might seem strange to publish two separate tabletop roleplaying games featuring the same franchise, Cubicle 7 has done this before. Cubicle 7 previously published two distinct tabletop roleplaying games based on Lord of the Rings. The One Ring was a standalone game using unique mechanics and rules crafted for Middle-Earth, while Adventures in Middle-Earth adapted Dungeons & Dragons rules. Of course, 5E is best-known as a combat-focused RPG system, while Doctor Who prides itself as a franchise built on finding alternatives to violence whenever possible. It will be interesting to see how Cubicle 7 blends the two together, and whether the adventures took inspiration from The Wild Beyond the Witchlight, a recent D&D adventure that offers non-combat solutions to every encounter faced by players. 

More and more tabletop RPG publishers are looking to capitalize on Dungeons & Dragons’ current domination of the RPG marketplace. Steamforged recently announced that its Dark Souls Roleplaying Game would use a modified version of 5E rules. 

The official description for Doctors & Daleks reads: The wild adventures of everyone’s favourite Time Lord comes to the world’s most popular roleplaying game in Doctors and Daleks. Take your gaming group into the TARDIS and travel anywhere, anywhen. Want to meet Leornado da Vinci? Or see what life is like in the year 3,000? What about another planet entirely? All of space and time is your Venusian macro-oyster, but keep your wits about you — there’s a lot of danger in the vastness of eternity.

Expect more news about Doctors & Daleks soon.